tell me a story, and I will remember
Doing theology through personal narrative
by Ina Hughes

The spiritual chronicler and prose-poet laureate of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, prefaces his book, The Gates of the Forest, with this parable from real life:

When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening the Jews it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted.

Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say, "Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer." And again the miracles would be accomplished.

Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient."

And it was sufficient.

It is not by accident that all great teachers of every religion used stories to get their message across. You can preach me a sermon, show me a doctrine, recite a creed -- and I might be impressed.

But tell me a story, and I will remember.

Scholars generally agree World War II not only reconfigured maps, it changed the way bookstores, libraries and publishing houses did business. It used to be that when people went to buy or check out a book, most of what they had to chose from was catalogued under "fiction" and displayed on shelves near the front door. That way the general public wouldn't have to bother scrounging around among dusty poetry anthologies, textbooks and volume after volume of dry-to-the-bone historical compilations.

Fiction. Everybody wanted fiction.

Nonfiction was the wallflower of the literary world: too boring and academic to be entertaining, too self-restrained to tell a zippy story, too stifled to inspire or stay with the reader beyond the moment. Creative nonfiction was an oxymoron, and writers of plain old "not fiction" -- it being the only kind of writing described by what it is not -- had the reputation of being people who weren't clever enough to make anything up and whose calamaties and happy endings were so homemade they were unconvincing.

Other than cookbooks, dictionaries and an occasional coffee-table book to match the drapes, adults preferred to spend their money on fiction. In elementary schools of the 1940s, nonfiction was, for all practical purposes, limited to little orange biographies of dead white males in American history, Booker T. Washington and Florence Nightingale being the token exceptions.

Nonfiction, creative or otherwise, was to literature as attic sale is to boutique.

Then things began to change, and it was storytellers like Eli Wiesel who started the ball rolling in another direction. Carnage in Europe had devastated whole nations. News traveled faster than ever before, and returning soldiers got home with less time "to put the war behind them." Rumors of wartime atrocities rolled across both the Atlantic and Pacific, atrocities we Americans not only could not imagine, but didn't want to.

People became less and less satisfied with second-hand reports, myths, commentaries and the John Wayne/Doris Day version of reality. The Saturday Evening Post, Life magazine, the news reels at the movies made events more "current" than ever before. We wanted to read the letters soldiers wrote their moms back home, hear for ourselves the stories from concentration-camp victims, understand the theories and political intrigue of the Normandy invasion.

But even more than that, we wanted to know what people did to survive emotionally and spiritually, because if we knew that, we might be able to believe in, or even construct, our own principles and religious values. William Howarth, who teaches Creative Nonfiction at Princeton, explains it this way: Personal stories flourish in a period of great upheaval. People need something concrete, something real to hold onto.

Nonfiction began its regeneration in the early 1940s. In the 1960s, the personal narrative quickly grew into a genre in its own right -- as so-called "creative nonfiction." Both of these were times of serious flux. People began to lose sight of who they were. The lines began to blur between faith and reason. Old truths clashed with new discoveries.

We needed real stories, of real people, told with grace and honesty, to see us through.

Oral tradition wasn't even good enough anymore. We wanted to read and re-read these true-life stories, to bring them into our homes because they had made their way into our hearts. We wanted to own them for ourselves, and so both writers and readers began putting more intellectual and emotional energy into nonfiction. Stories whose purpose and intent it is to tell the truth as we know it became more popular than fiction.

Ancient Greeks thought there to be only two genres of writing: poetry and history. There was less interest in labels. No Dewey decimal system yet devised to separate off different kinds of writing, and writers did not have to choose a category in which to define themselves. No line was drawn between storyteller and philosopher. This seems odd to us. Either a story is true or it is not. Nevertheless, Heinrich Schumann used Homer's "Iliad," a nonfictional "document" you might call it, to locate and unearth the actual remains of Troy.

Poetry and history together.

Essentially that is what creative nonfiction is: poetry and history together. Fiction is "made up." Personal narratives or, as it is called today, creative nonfiction, are stories we discover, stories that explain who we are and what we believe. A fancier name for it might be biomythography, but creative nonfiction is nothing less than truth wearing its Sunday clothes.

The nonfiction is in the experience-based nature of these stories. The writer makes a contract with the reader that what she is writing is the truth as she knows it. The creative is in the telling. As opposed to directions on a can of soup or the intricate details of the life cycle of a dragonfly, or even the objective reporting of a good biographer -- all of which fall under the non-fiction umbrella -- creative nonfiction challenges the writer to uses language and plot in such a way that the reader's story and the writer's story merge into one, the confluences of two rivers.

The implications of all this for theology are obvious.

The Bible is a collection of stories, and although they are in a class by themselves, I have come to believe that holy writ is a continuum. The personal parables we share out of our own experience and the psalms of both lament and praise we compose in our hearts are all part of the same sacred testament, bearing witness to the mysterious ways in which God works.

Like all sacred scripture, such stories are meant to be shared. Creative nonfiction is the mother tongue of faith.

Alex Haley once said that when a person dies, a whole library dies. He didn't mean everyone is endowed with the kind of lively imagination that can fabricate great plots and cliff-hangers out of the what-ifs of life. He is describing how you and I have in us stories only we can tell, and if we don't tell them, they will die with us. Stories are our first inklings of immortality. They hold alive the people we have loved and lost awhile. They keep happy experiences fresh, worthy perspectives documented long after their due-date has expired.

They give grief a meaning and courage a purpose.

The stories of our life become our life. They give witness to family and interpersonal dynamics, show how faith and values are honed and made shatter-proof. Or not.

In them we reap the ability to survive, perhaps even distinguish ourselves as we take on the ghosts and giants that haunt a spoiled, over-stimulated culture. We learn from the stories we are told what is important, how to differentiate between the things we should celebrate and the things we should fear. Because of the stories in us and around us, we have less excuse for boredom, for failure, for diminishing the kind of person we were meant to be, either by God's design or family expectations.

Hard as they try, and we find a hearty supply of efforts on the bestseller lists, impersonal how-to books don't pack the wallop a good story does -- whether it's thin thighs or God in heaven we're trying to "get."

Many features have been singled out as the definitive difference between us and our creature cousins out in oceans and up in trees. We are the only animal that blushes, that prays. We're the only animal that cooks its food, paints its face, drinks bottled water.

Listens to Barry Manilow.

Most significant of all we are the only animal that tries to figure life out, that imagines what it feels like to die, that broods and dreams and imagines. We are the only animal that can talk our stories or, better still, write them down to leave behind or to share with others. Our dependence on each other's stories goes back as far in time as to when our ancestors, admiring their opposing thumbs, sat around campfires and talked the night away.

Eli Wiesel is right. The only way to find the light, to puzzle our way through the forest, to remember who we are and whose we are, is to swap those stories. I tell you mine in hopes that you will tell me yours so that together we can understand our story. Why is that so important?

Because only in living our story will we ever understand the story.

Perhaps that is why creative nonfiction is outselling, outsmarting, outpacing fiction. The New York Times consistently reviews more nonfiction than fiction. The growing popularity of reality TV (which may be the devil in the blue dress when it comes to nonfiction), the number of life-based documentaries and first-person tell-alls, plus the fact that we have at least one 24-hour biography channel, further testify that in today's world, nonfiction has gone to the head of the class.

As odd as it sounds, the Age of Communication has made it more convenient to allow ourselves and our children to grow up on other people's stories. It's easy to become captives in that great alphabetized empire of ABC, CBS and all the rest, not to mention the bytes and chomps the Internet takes out of our imagination. We can't let technology be the cat that gets our tongue, tempting as it is. We need to share with each other our own situation comedies, commentaries, love stories, documentaries, mysteries. We need to pass along the songs and parables we discover within ourselves, from our own experiences.

Poet Gwendolyn Brooks longs for "a teller in a time like this." Kurt Vonnegut says we need to "become unstuck in time." William Zinsser points out that telling each other our stories is like "reinventing the truth." All of this is just same song, another verse, of all the old hymns and scriptures that call us to be storytellers.

It's how we do theology.

Ina Hughes is a columnist for The Knoxville News-Sentinel in Knoxville, Tenn.